by Jon Billman
“If you were captured by the Sioux, the idea was to shoot yourself before they had a chance to torture you.” The actor steers with his knees, making finger pistols in the air over the steering wheel. “Troopers kept one round, their last round, for just that purpose. Shoot yourself in the head before they could cut your heart out while you watched.”
The road is rough here and cuts through the charcoal remains of a forest fire that burned most of the salable Northern Cheyenne Reservation, but it gets better when they hit Ashland, back to everyone’s Montana.
“Private,” says the Colonel, not shouting over the rattle and thunk of the car so that his words are lost in the noise and it appears that he is just moving his lips, “know what the slowest thing in the world is?” The warm July wind rushes through the open windows and the gaps in the brittle rubber gasket surrounding the windshield. The Private is used to this Maverick lip-reading.
“Besides us right now?” says the Private. The muffler and tailpipe have a few holes in them, like tin whistles, and the sunflower seeds taste like exhaust. “It’s either us right now or a reservation funeral procession with only one set of jumper cables,” says the Private. The speedometer needle is shaking at around fifty-one miles an hour.
The Private isn’t laughing. Charley Reynolds isn’t laughing. The Colonel’s eyes glass over at the humble recognition that he’s just told a joke everyone heard many campaigns ago. But as you get older—he is forty-one, nearly past his Custer prime—you forget. Everything turns to history with daguerreotype eyes and brittle, yellowed edges.
BUGS
Charley Reynolds stands on the Private’s lap and sticks his nose into the fifty-one-mile-an-hour prairie wind. The Private lets his palm ride on the stream of air and dreams of becoming a scout. The Colonel talks numbers. Bag limits. Length, girth, weight. Hook size. Tippet strength. Rod action. He talks of the beefiest brown in Montana, the heftiest rainbow in Dakota Territory. “Pleistocene man used shards of bone for hooks,” he says. “Indians used rock-hard spirals of rawhide until we traded steel hooks with them. Custer used steel.”
What is different about Sue’s flies, different from the flies tied by hundreds of nimble-fingered Western women for pennies apiece, is that they are tied for fish, not for fishermen and their aesthetics. Unless, that is, they are true fishermen and know the difference deep inside, like right and wrong.
Her flies have something of the ancient in them, borrowing from her ancestors on the frontier, as well as from evolution: her Darwinian ancestors, the fish. Sue tests her flies in an old aquarium in her workroom. The aquarium is stained, filled with the murky water of the Little Bighorn. With a pair of fencing pliers, she cuts the hook off at the bend and ties it onto a length of leader attached to a two-foot-long willow branch and flings it into the tank from across the small room. Weight. Aerodynamics. Flight. She is looking for balance. In the aquarium are several small rainbow and brown trout. Sue gets on her back, crawls underneath the aquarium stand, and studies the trouts’ reactions to the new insects through the tank’s glass bottom.
After only a week she throws a burlap water bag over her shoulder and walks to the river to turn the trout back into the Little Bighorn. “Thank you,” she tells them, “thank you. Goodbye.” She then unfolds the little pack rod from her day pack and ties on one of her new and experimental flies. She casts and catches new fish to help her with her work. Though it rarely happens, if she does not catch new helper-fish, she walks back to the trailer with the empty burlap bag, thinking about how she is going to adjust the new patterns. She enjoys being outsmarted now and then.
What matters is what an imitation looks like on the water, in the water, not warm and dry in a tackle shop that smells like chicken livers and epoxy. Sue’s workroom smells like old wool, spruce, and duck feathers. Damp dog, river water, coffee. She rendezvouses with Ben Fish at the river and bails the aquarium out once a week, trout or no trout.
If it is late and he is drunk, the Colonel may tell you Sue ties the most beautiful, most perfect trout flies in the Louisiana Purchase. The Colonel calls them bugs.
THE TREATY
Mr. and Mrs. Owen Doggett celebrated their three-year anniversary by getting a six-pack of Heineken instead of Rainier and toasting the event at home while watching She Wore a Yellow Ribbon on video.
A week later, that belly-dancing night at the Mint, Sue said only this: “Three strikes, you’re out.” The faraway look in the Colonel’s eyes was a sure sign he knew she meant it and he didn’t shoot back, didn’t ask about strike one, strike two.
Sue calls the legal papers the treaty. She’ll get the waterbed and the microwave. The banana boxes of Harley Davidson parts. The eight-track player and turntable. The veneer bedroom set. The Toyota Corolla and the single-wide.
The third strike is named Salome.
SALOME ON SATURDAYS
Salome told the Colonel and the Private about the real live camels in the Passion Play on her breaks at the Mint. She is an actress. She works the Passion Play during the week and the Mint most Fridays and Saturdays. She also told the Colonel she could arrange a private audition for him because she happened to know for a fact that Pilate was moving to Florida and the director owed her a few favors that she’d probably never get a chance to cash in on anyway.
Belly dancing is hard work, she also said. So she took lots of breaks. She was not taking a break when Sue walked in after one of the battles to find her Colonel. Sue found him. The Colonel pleaded that it was all part of the act and belly dancing was an art form going back to biblical times and that it should be respected.
Horses, too, they have horses. Doves. Sheep. Donkeys.
THE BLACK HILLS EXPEDITION OF 1995
They stop in tiny Alzada for Cokes, oil, gas, beef jerky for Charley Reynolds, brake fluid, more sunflower seeds. The Colonel says to the Private, “You want to scrub them mustard bugs off the windshield?” It is Sunday afternoon when they cross the twenty or so miles of the townless northeast corner of Wyoming. Yes, the Colonel is trying out for Pontius Pilate, but they will fish, too.
“Nothing between this car and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence,” the Private tells the Colonel.
“Nothing between this car and the South Pole but Mount Rush-more and a fistful of gold mines,” the Colonel tells the Private.
They cross the Belle Fourche River and see the Black Hills, the sacred land the Indians were afraid of.
“They heard thunder in there and thought it was the Everywhere Spirit,” says the Colonel.
“Maybe they were right,” replies the Private. “This wind does blow.”
Spearfish, Dakota Territory. The sign at the edge of town has a trout with a spear sticking through it. “Trout are not indigenous to the Black Hills,” the Colonel says to the Private and Charley Reynolds. “They were stocked, all of them. The Indians speared chubs and suckers. That’s all there were.”
The sun is shining and the summer school coeds are not wearing much. “Welcome to Calvary,” says the Colonel.
The Colonel tells Charley Reynolds to stay in the car. The dog jumps onto the gravel parking lot of the Shady Spot Motel (phone, free coffee) and hightails it to a bush, which he immediately sniffs, then waters. The Private tackles him and lugs the hound back to the car.
The Shady Spot rests near the Passion Play amphitheater. Families here enjoy the steady increases in the value of their ranch-styles and don’t mind the flash and rumble of the Crucifixion and Ascension three nights a week. There are coffeehouses and bookstores and no bad neighborhoods in Spearfish. No railroad tracks. No reservations. The Passion Play is here because the Mount Rush-more tourists were here first, and the Black Hills seem a fitting place for Christ to appear, should he visit America.
The elderly desk clerk looks them over in their forage caps, Bermuda shorts, T-shirts (the Colonel’s Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge Tour, the Private’s Bagelbird), and sandals.
“You fellas with the Passion Play?” asks the desk
clerk.
“We’re Texas Rangers in town on a pornography bust,” says the Colonel. “You rent by the hour, too?” The desk clerk does not think this is funny, is frowning. The Private nods. “Yes, we are here for the Passion Play. There a discount for that?” One dollar.
The Colonel then pays the two-dollar surcharge for Charley Reynolds after the desk clerk says, looking down at the dog no car can contain, “I see you brought a dog.”
THE BOY COLONEL
Her flies are small miracles. Tiny damsels, Daisy Millers, opulent caddis flies in all colors and sizes. Shiny Telico nymphs. Little Adams. Noble royal coachmen. Muddler minnows and grasshoppers. Bead-heads. Streamers. Hare’s ears. Stoneflies, salmon flies. Woolly buggers, black gnats, and renegades. She even invented a fly she calls the Libbie Bacon, tied with the soft hair from Charley Reynolds’s belly.
“It’s a shame that you’ll now have to buy them, pay for them,” the Private tells the Colonel. But their fly boxes are still worlds of insects: peacock hurl, elk hair, chicken hackle and deer tail, rabbit fur and mallard feather woven to life around a gold hook.
“And you won’t?” asks the Colonel.
Sue gave the Private a full fly box as a Christmas gift the first year he moved to Hardin from Wyoming. Sometimes at night, when he’s alone—most every night—and cannot sleep, he opens the box under his reading light and gently touches the flies and his heart speeds up a bit. When he would lose a fly—on a large willow, a snag in the river, maybe a fish—Sue would replace it with one of the same kind but yet different, one thing but also something else. None of her flies are exactly alike. The Private pointed this out to the Colonel, who still calls them bugs.
The Private started keeping the fly journal the first day he fished the flies Sue tied for him, the morning of the day after Christmas. It was bitter cold and the guides on the rod kept freezing, so that he would have to dip the graphite shaft into the water to de-ice the rod before each cast. Yet he caught more trout than ever before in his life.
While the Colonel ties fresh leader and tippet material onto his line, the Private looks through his fly box. Their plan is to take in tonight’s Passion Play (free tickets) and do some fishing tomorrow after the ten-o’clock audition. From the motel room window, they can see Calvary, the sturdy cross as big as a pine tree, up the hill to the east of the amphitheater.
They were trying to have children—if not directly trying to prevent them is trying. Sue would often say, “I already have my hands full taking care of one boy. I don’t need any more.” This concerns the Colonel still. Even more so now. His mustache weighs at his lip when he thinks about it too hard.
SCOUTING
Spearfish Creek runs strong and clear through the Passion Play neighborhood. Today you can stand on any bridge in town and peer down at fish feeding against the current. Many healthy rainbow and browns. The Colonel’s eyes widen as the men count the black silhouettes of trout feeding on the insects that wash their way. Heartbeats quicken. He calls this creek a river.
The detachment of three—a colonel, a private, and a basset hound scout—set out into the afternoon sun from the Shady Spot to scout the holes, the “honey buckets,” they will fish tomorrow. There are many of these honey buckets running through the back yards of the people who don’t mind living in the New Testament neighborhood.
As they patrol the river, the troopers wave to the grillers and the gardeners and the fertilizers and waterers, crossing now and then through the cool, calf-deep water in their sandals, though only some of the neighbors wave back—some sheepishly from behind their gazing balls and ceramic deer; some annoyed from behind their smoking Webers; some taken aback with beers in their hands as if, Honey, I think Colonel George Armstrong Custer in a Rolling Stones T-shirt and his basset hound just waded through our back yard.
THE COLOR OF SUNDAY
Salome did not tell them about this: the hatchery! How could she have left this out? The creek runs under a stonework bridge, and they wade out from the shadow of the bridge and peer through the chain-link and barbed-wire No Trespassing fence of what the sign heralds as the D.C. BOOTH FISH HATCHERY, EST. 1896. And for whole moments, minutes, they are old men outside the chain-link of the city swimming pool, Seaworld, Mainland, staring in.
Tall cottonwoods, oaks, and spruce trees, as well as the flowers that have been planted around each of the three stone-and-concrete rearing pools, reflect off the green-gray water. Two lovers and a family with a stroller and children walk along the boardwalk and gaze into the pools. You can, for a quarter, buy a handful of trout meal from the gumball machine bolted to the railing. Many signs: No Fishing.
A young woman in a khaki uniform sows trout meal from a tin bucket. The water boils with feeding fingerlings. Her auburn hair catches the late-afternoon light and is the color of Sunday. She is singing to the fry as she feeds them. Her hand dips into the bucket and she bows slightly and releases the meal. “I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men.” Charley Reynolds chases a butterfly at the edge of the shallow water running over their feet, never catching it, as the men watch, mouths slightly closed, hearts racing. “I will make you fishers of men, if you follow me.”
The lovers and the family stop to lean over the railing and look down into another pool, a larger pool. The father buys a handful of trout food and gives it to the young boy, who flings it all at once. The water explodes with trout, trout as big as—or bigger than— any the Colonel and the Private and Charley Reynolds have ever seen. “Good Lord, will you look at that! Did you see the size of those fins?” asks the Colonel. “Those tails!”
“Yes, she is beautiful,” says the Private in a dry-mouthed whisper.
SUNDAY IN JERUSALEM
The Black Hills Passion Play draws people from all over the country, from all over the world. The Colonel and the Private have never been here. Young Christians in purple tunics direct cars, sell tickets, sell programs. An official program costs as much as it costs Charley Reynolds to stay at the Shady Spot. Outside the ticket office/gift shop there is a rather graceless statue, Christ Stilling theWaters, by Gutzon Borglum, the artist who blasted four presidents into a mountain just south of here. The Christ of the sculpture looks less like he’s stilling waters than waving to friends.
The evening is cool. The tickets Salome gave them are not excellent, not VIP tickets. The troopers are in the center, the fifty-yard line, but back fifty rows, back far enough to wonder how much real weight Salome pulls around here. But they can see downtown Jerusalem. They can see Calvary. They can see the tall cottonwoods that surround the trout hatchery a couple of blocks away. The troopers stand and remove their forage caps and place them over their hearts for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There is a sliver of moon, not yet a quarter. There is an evening star in the west. The fanfare ends. A blond angel appears in the Great Temple and recites the prologue, “O ye children of God …”
“It’s going to be a long night—look at this program—twenty-two scenes,” says the Colonel.
“That which you will experience today, O people, treasure well within your hearts. Let it be the light to lead you—until your last day.” With that the angel disappears and the streets of Jerusalem fill with asses, sheep, armored centurions on white stallions, and laughing, running children.
When the play ends, the troopers are not besieged with passion, which is a little disappointing to both of them. An hour and a half of Sunday left. The actor has an audition in eleven and a half hours. Pontius Pilate is a muscular, tan, deep-voiced man. No long dirty-blond curls to his shoulders. No bushy handlebar mustache. It will not be easy.
FINS THE SIZE OF PRAIRIE SCHOONER SAILS
“Private, you awake?” asks the Colonel at a quarter to midnight.
“Yes,” replies the Private. “Thinking about Sue?”
“No.”
“The audition tomorrow?”
“No.” Those fish. “Private, did you see those dorsal fins?”
CUSTER�
��S LAST STAND
They are out the door at midnight with an electric beep of the Colonels Timex Ironman, waders on, vests heavy with tackle, wicker creels, rods in hand, Charley Reynolds in the lead, scouting his way up the creek. They wade through the same back yards, which are now dark except for a few dim yard lights and the electric blue of hanging bug lights and TVs through a couple windows. Walking, wading slowly, they have enough light to see by. They do not cast, do not hit the honey buckets they mapped in their heads earlier. “Just where are we going?” asks the Private. The troopers are advancing.
They stop under the bridge. Charley Reynolds is up ahead, rustling through some willows along the bank. They take the lines from the reels and thread them through the guides on their graphite rods. The Colonel reaches into a vest pocket and pulls out a tin fly box. He opens it and the insects come to life in the dim glow of a streetlight. Gold bead-heads, hooks, and peacock hurl shine in the low light. The Colonel selects a size ten delta-wing caddis fly, threads his tippet through the eye, cinches down a simple Orvis knot, and slicks the insect up with silvery floatant to keep it on top of the water.
“Fishing dry, huh,” says the Private.
“I’m not yet sure what these Dakota fish like for breakfast.”
The Private ties on a humble Libbie Bacon in a size fourteen that will sink maybe a foot below the surface in still water, but no more.
Upstream, Charley Reynolds finds a low spot where he ducks under the fence and into the D. C. Booth Fish Hatchery. The troopers watch the basset hounds silhouette as he sniffs around the ponds and lunges at the bugs ticking under the floodlights. “How the hell did he get in?” asks the Private. “Let’s advance along the fenceline,” says the Colonel.
